Diner Party New World Order Global Shadow Goobermint

[Eddie]

I found Palloy's statement about poetry baffling too. I would have thought Allen Ginsberg was right up his alley.

The most remarkable thing about this poem is how well it has stood the test of time. It was written when I was just shy of two months old. Existential threats are everywhere now, but they aren't new.

America

Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

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[Eddie]

Be kind in your assessment. I'm rather close to this poems author.

An amazing poem, as I'm sure both you and the author are aware.

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[JRM]

Be kind in your assessment. I'm rather close to this poems author.

An amazing poem, as I'm sure both you and the author are aware.

Oh, I agree! 

....

I had "modified" (added to) my last post.  I thought to point folks back to it so they can see more of my thoughts on poetry.

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[K-Dog]

As the investigative arm and chief of the shadow government secret police I have some disturbing news.  I was water-boarding one of Obama's black suited spooks and learned that the paper-pushing arm of the current deep state is without humor or the intelligence to distinguish between old farts having fun on the Internet and real nut-job terrorists.  This means discussions about the break up of the United States into smaller autonomous regions or its replacement with a SHADOW GOVERNMENT will attract investigation.  Such discussions will be perceived as serious.  That it is all in fun will be ignored.

Remember America has real secret police now but to most people they are a complete secret.  They get paid and to earn their pay checks they have to investigate something.  The merits of their investigations are irrelevant.  It may as well be us.

I would have figured that as Director of the GBI you would have outlawed Waterboarding.

What are the Diner Tools for ferreting out the TRUTH in investigations?

How is the Diner Global Police Force organized?  Voters wish to know.

RE

I was kidding about the water-boarding.  It really is torture.  I was not kidding about everything else I wrote.  But you got me thinking about all this.  I never imagined myself as chief watch-dog but the position has possibilities.

TRUTH is verified by a robust system of checks and balances.  Nobody has too much power and internal transparent procedures mean all actions which can affect citizens are under continual review to make sure rights are protected.  Citizen privacy is a top priority since we have the tools to examine anyone in excruciating detail and we collect enormous quantities of data on a continual basis.  The only time our data ever become public is when our wheels of justice turn and demand it.

The organizational structure is a combination of top down and distributed elements and is very efficient.  It is a large organization which works with other agencies to make sure sustainability, justice, and fairness blossoms across the land.  I prefer to think of it as the Department of Making Shit Happen.  It is a vital part of our new socially sustainalist government.

Even as Director I can't look at any investigation without a 'need to know' or order a particular investigation unless I know it will be found in review to meet appropriate criteria and be found as 'reasonably justified'.  Legitimacy is determined by fixed procedures put in place to curtail abuse of power and the procedures are monitored by our internal affairs branch.

We continually monitor our own employees.  Sociopaths are eliminated from the agency and put to work in jobs where they can do no harm to citizens.  We have ways of identifying them.  Our agents have excellent social skills and are strongly empathetic.  They take their work seriously, have a passion for it, and they take pride in doing their work well and professionally.

Any time we actually mess with people and get in their face it is the end result of a process that has reviewed the particular investigation and found the action appropriate.  Criteria must be met.

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[jdwheeler42]

I would have figured that as Director of the GBI you would have outlawed Waterboarding.

What are the Diner Tools for ferreting out the TRUTH in investigations?

This is my recommendation:

! No longer available

on a continuous loop, of course....

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[Surly1]

Another problem with paper books is they are HEAVY and BULKY to move around if you don't live in the same place all the time.

//So by the time I finished college, I had hundreds of books sitting on the shelves in the house in Queens.  They stayed there until my mom sold the house and everything got shipped to MO.  At the time I was trucking, so in the boxes they were packed in they went into a storage unit where they remain to this day.  I haven't been able to bring myself to give up that storage unit which has tons of memorabilia from my youth.  So I pay the storage fee every month for the last 15-20 years or so.

The ebooks are much better for Nomads, that whole library and much more fits on a chip the size of my fingernail.  That does depend though of course on having working computers.

Post collapse, I think both paper books and computers will be around for quite a while, with the paper outlasting the computers but how well libraries will be maintained is an open question.  So books of either type will not be around forever.

RE

Same here with books. Got a house and garage full of them I can't part with. The wife breaks my aggies constantly to get rid of them.

How can I explain to her she goes before the books without getting in trouble

So I keep the yap shut and wait for the topic to change. 

Got boxes full of Geographics and New Yorkers as well. 

Boy, do I identify.

Still have most of the best books from college, which are now pushing 50 years old. Plus, when I was raising my daughter, I determined it was incumbent upon me to recreate the Library at Alexandria as best I could. The good news is that my daughter never asked for ANYTHING growing up except books. She grew up a reader, for which I remain grateful.

So the decor at Chez Surly runs to Musty Library. And I have dozens of boxes of books in storage units, not counting the boxes of books that Contrary brought to the party. Fortunately, she loves living amidst dusty tomes and rare editions of both classic books and miscellany.

Managing the magazines remains a constant issue. They tend to accumulate.

It never occurred to me that I was actually preparing for collapse, exercising Morris Berman's "monastic option."

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[jdwheeler42]

As an item that may be of interest to Diner's relative to this topic of the Harvard Classics.

I purchased a handsome leather bound edition of the entire series a few years back for my grandchildren.

They are being given away almost on E-Bay when one considers their original cost. They are offered often and real nice like new sets appear often at absurdly low prices.

Might make a very nice gift for a favorite youngster Diner's that may not be available in such a wonderful format for long.

Thanks for both suggestions, GO.  I am currently bidding on one complete set, and I plan on getting the ebooks downloaded within a day.  Personally, I think anyone who is the least bit serious about leadership should at least be downloading the free books.

I also don't think it should be either/or between GO's and RE's proposals for education.  I think a combination of both a good technical education and a good liberal arts education is necessary to have well-rounded citizens.  I like the idea of having a 10 to 15 year sequence of going through the classics of world literature, ancient and modern, that all people who have attained basic literacy are expected to attend.  The commitment would be small but regular, like an hour every night, or 2 hours 3 times a week.

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[RE]

I like the idea of having a 10 to 15 year sequence of going through the classics of world literature, ancient and modern, that all people who have attained basic literacy are expected to attend.  The commitment would be small but regular, like an hour every night, or 2 hours 3 times a week.

If GO had been reading for comprehension he would have seen that the Education Platform specifies 1 hour every night reading after your daytime education in practical skills.

RE

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[RE]

Even as Director I can't look at any investigation without a 'need to know' or order a particular investigation unless I know it will be found in review to meet appropriate criteria and be found as 'reasonably justified'.

Who determines the "need to know"?

Otherwise sounds like a pretty good plank for the platform. 

We still need good planks for Healthcare, Taxation, and Foreign Policy to insure Peace.

RE

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[JRM]

Another problem with paper books is they are HEAVY and BULKY to move around if you don't live in the same place all the time.

//So by the time I finished college, I had hundreds of books sitting on the shelves in the house in Queens.  They stayed there until my mom sold the house and everything got shipped to MO.  At the time I was trucking, so in the boxes they were packed in they went into a storage unit where they remain to this day.  I haven't been able to bring myself to give up that storage unit which has tons of memorabilia from my youth.  So I pay the storage fee every month for the last 15-20 years or so.

The ebooks are much better for Nomads, that whole library and much more fits on a chip the size of my fingernail.  That does depend though of course on having working computers.

Post collapse, I think both paper books and computers will be around for quite a while, with the paper outlasting the computers but how well libraries will be maintained is an open question.  So books of either type will not be around forever.

RE

Same here with books. Got a house and garage full of them I can't part with. The wife breaks my aggies constantly to get rid of them.

How can I explain to her she goes before the books without getting in trouble

So I keep the yap shut and wait for the topic to change. 

Got boxes full of Geographics and New Yorkers as well. 

Boy, do I identify.

Still have most of the best books from college, which are now pushing 50 years old. Plus, when I was raising my daughter, I determined it was incumbent upon me to recreate the Library at Alexandria as best I could. The good news is that my daughter never asked for ANYTHING growing up except books. She grew up a reader, for which I remain grateful.

So the decor at Chez Surly runs to Musty Library. And I have dozens of boxes of books in storage units, not counting the boxes of books that Contrary brought to the party. Fortunately, she loves living amidst dusty tomes and rare editions of both classic books and miscellany.

Managing the magazines remains a constant issue. They tend to accumulate.

It never occurred to me that I was actually preparing for collapse, exercising Morris Berman's "monastic option."

Details Books

Books

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[JRM]

Details a what?

a what?

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[Eddie]

That reminds me... I ordered a signed first of Rebuilding the Indian. Wonder why it hasn't showed up, it's been a few weeks. Probably the USPS again.

https://www.amazon.com/Rebuilding-Indian-Memoir-Fred-Haefele/dp/0803273584/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467922597&sr=1-1&keywords=rebuilding+the+indian

Finally got a nice signed 1st of Where the Red Fern Grows. It's one of those that had a small first run and then they changed the dust jacket. The later ones are not as collectible, even though technically it was still the first printing.


Collectible


Same edition, somewhat less collectible

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[Palloy]

Sometimes a good poem will be intellectually somewhat ambiguous

Well that's a poetic way of putting it.     Don't get me wrong, I'm not against people amusing themselves by writing and reading poetry if they want to, but to make poetry mandatory as proof of suitability for high office is totally wrong-headed.  Keep intellectual ambiguity right out of politics.

There is a subset of English (and I expect all other languages) that we might call Plain English, where words only have ONE meaning, and this should be used for writing all laws.  The fact that current laws are NOT written in Plain English is proof that politicians are on the fiddle somehow - and gives rise to lawyers, endless court cases and surprising judgments.  People should be able to read and understand the laws they live under, and defend themselves in court.

Computer languages can only be interpreted one way by the computer, and so Plain English could theoretically be used as a computer language - COBOL was an attempt at this.  Can you understand this? (hint, you can) :

MULTIPLY radius BY 2 GIVING temp.
MULTIPLY temp BY PI GIVING circumference.

Unfortunately in the decades since I used to earn a living writing this stuff, COBOL has faded away and PHP has become popular:

$temp = $radius * 2 ;
$circumference = $temp * M_PI ;

and woe betide you if you forget that first semi-colon, because the program will stop with the error message:
unexpected T_STRING '$circumference' on line 2

The C language is even more complicated as you have to declare what types of data "radius" and "circumference" (and don't forget "temp" ! ) are before you can use them.  To me this is a step backwards in language development, and I refuse to use it.

Anyway, since I am in charge of computer security, I would start by enacting this law, from Bulgaria of all places:

http://thehackernews.com/2016/07/open-source-software-govt.html
Bulgaria passes Law that mandates Government Software must be Open Source
July 07, 2016
Mohit Kumar
 
Do you have any idea what the software you have installed is doing stealthily in the background? If it's not an open source software, can you find out?

Usually, the answer is no.

After Edward Snowden’s revelations, it's clear that how desperately government agencies wants to put secret backdoors in your network, devices, and software.

However, Bulgaria has come forward with an all new set of laws that would be appreciated by privacy lovers and open-source community.

The Bulgarian Parliament has passed legislative amendments to its Electronic Governance Act that require all software written for the country's government to be fully open-sourced and developed in the public Github repository.

This means that source code of software developed for the Bulgarian government would be accessible to everyone and provided free for use without limitations.

Article 58A of the Electronic Governance Act states that administrative authorities must include the following requirements for procuring software:

    "When the subject of the contract includes the development of computer programs, computer programs must meet the criteria for open-source software; all copyright and related rights on the relevant computer programs, their source code, the design of interfaces, and databases which are subject to the order should arise for the principal in full, without limitations in the use, modification, and distribution; and development should be done in the repository maintained by the agency in accordance with Art 7c pt. 18."


However, it does not mean that Bulgaria is going to shift to Linux overnight. It means that whatever computer software, code, databases and programming interfaces the government procures will be freely available for others to read, modify and use, said Bulgarian government adviser Bozhidar Bozhanov.

    "Existing solutions are purchased on licensing terms, and they remain unaffected (although we strongly encourage the use of open source solutions for that as well)," Bozhanov said in a blog post.


He added that the decision "is a good step for better government software and less abandonware, and I hope other countries follow our somewhat 'radical' approach of putting it in the law."

The move will also allow researchers and white hat hackers to report security loopholes and vulnerabilities in government websites that are left unpatched for years, helping the government to detect bad security practices earlier.

However, criminal mind people could also use the flaws for malicious purpose rather than reporting it to the government.

With the new amendments, Bulgaria becomes the first country to make a law out of open source governance, and we hope that other nations follow this suit.

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[Surly1]

Another problem with paper books is they are HEAVY and BULKY to move around if you don't live in the same place all the time.

//So by the time I finished college, I had hundreds of books sitting on the shelves in the house in Queens.  They stayed there until my mom sold the house and everything got shipped to MO.  At the time I was trucking, so in the boxes they were packed in they went into a storage unit where they remain to this day.  I haven't been able to bring myself to give up that storage unit which has tons of memorabilia from my youth.  So I pay the storage fee every month for the last 15-20 years or so.

The ebooks are much better for Nomads, that whole library and much more fits on a chip the size of my fingernail.  That does depend though of course on having working computers.

Post collapse, I think both paper books and computers will be around for quite a while, with the paper outlasting the computers but how well libraries will be maintained is an open question.  So books of either type will not be around forever.

RE

Same here with books. Got a house and garage full of them I can't part with. The wife breaks my aggies constantly to get rid of them.

How can I explain to her she goes before the books without getting in trouble

So I keep the yap shut and wait for the topic to change. 

Got boxes full of Geographics and New Yorkers as well. 

Boy, do I identify.

Still have most of the best books from college, which are now pushing 50 years old. Plus, when I was raising my daughter, I determined it was incumbent upon me to recreate the Library at Alexandria as best I could. The good news is that my daughter never asked for ANYTHING growing up except books. She grew up a reader, for which I remain grateful.

So the decor at Chez Surly runs to Musty Library. And I have dozens of boxes of books in storage units, not counting the boxes of books that Contrary brought to the party. Fortunately, she loves living amidst dusty tomes and rare editions of both classic books and miscellany.

Managing the magazines remains a constant issue. They tend to accumulate.

It never occurred to me that I was actually preparing for collapse, exercising Morris Berman's "monastic option."

Details Books

Books

Perfect!

 

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